Okay. On my opinion for the national debt the ONLY way to actually get it started is to cut spending. Now before everyone goes crazy, let me rest my case...hahaha.

Many people believe the answer is raising taxes. If this would be done, the government WOULD directly get more money. That is a given. BUT, the average citizen of the United States would spend a whole lot less, due to more taxes being taken out of his/her paycheck. This would directly hurt the economy; and the economy makes up a HUGE part to if our government is successful or not.

Also if the government raised taxes, more and more people would not be able to afford them resulting in not having enough money to live a normal life. In result of that the people would be in severe debt or at poverty level. Because of this, the government would have to help them and essentially a lot of the money that the government received from the tax raise would be gone.

Our government in general just loves to spend, spend, spend. Raising taxes would not do any good. Think about it, say you gave someone $20 bucks a week and at the end of the week they would go to the store and buy something that was $20 and be thrilled and dandy and happy and whatever. BUT if one week you decided to give then $50 a week, then the person would totally walk past the $20 section and head straight to the more expensive items because they can afford it. Essentially this would be the SAME EXACT thing that would happen if the government raised taxes without cutting spending.

Now you might be saying: "what is there to cut spending on?" Domestic involvement. Now I know when some people are reading this they are all probably thinking, you're absolutely crazy.

When you think about it the U.S. has definitely been one of the leading countries to give money and assistance if a country gets in a hard time. Money that we do not have. Money that we NEED for our own country and our own people that are suffering.

When Japan was hit by the earthquake, the NEXT DAY the U.S. sent money and supplies to aid the victims. When Haiti was hit, the U.S. sent them a boatload of money to repair. That's great that we are ethical and do one to others as we would like them to do to us but the countries don't do that to us!

When we were hit with Hurricane Sandy not to long ago, I don't remember hearing other countries sending a bunch of money and assistance to help the people in the NE! I mean if the countries did, please tell me because I would love to hear that they did, but from my knowledge and research it was "Peace out America, you're on your own. Good luck!"

It is now just sad that politicians can't come together now and make an effective decisions without arguing all of the time. If myself, as a sixteen year old young woman, can come up with this, then I surely hope the government can set aside their differences and work all of this out!

I would really love to hear your opinion on my thread! Good or bad! (:

I would challenge you to reconcile the second and third paragraphs of your post against the reality of the Clinton Administration. Under his tax increases (reportedly among the largest in U.S. history), the U.S. economy took off like a rocket. Huge employment, balanced budgets, and a surplus which his successor turned into a staggering deficit.

However, I will give you a hall pass on your statements because, being 16, your recollection — or even awareness — of the U.S. economy of from '93 to '01 would be from the POV of a toddler, if not prenatal.

In any case, welcome to the forum, Lexi, and keep those thoughtful and youthful posts coming. We don't have enough young minds in this musty old room.

I would challenge you to reconcile the second and third paragraphs of your post against the reality of the Clinton Administration. Under his tax increases (reportedly among the largest in U.S. history), the U.S. economy took off like a rocket. Huge employment, balanced budgets, and a surplus which his successor turned into a staggering deficit.

I'm not against raising taxes on the wealthy back to where it was so don't read anything into my comment, just want to keep it fair and balanced. The higher tax rates helped, but the dot com bubble was a much greater influence, combined with the tax rates. Raising taxes will help but it's not going to bring us back to prosperity without other changes too, it's not the magic pill to pull the economy out of where it's at.

The deficit is a concern, to be sure. But the deficit is what it is for two obvious reasons. First, we were, and IMHO continue to be in the middle of a recession, and that means that the deficit automatically rises (a) because fewer people working means less money being paid in taxes and (b) because government expenditures automatically rise for unemployment payments and to prime the economic pump. Second, we fought three wars over the last decade (I'm including the "war on terrorism") and did not bother to raise taxes to pay for them--indeed, decided that the best thing to do was to cut taxes while fighting the three wars.

As far as I'm concerned the previous administration quite deliberately made deficits larger and larger and larger. Why? Because it has been the avowed intention of republicans at least since Reagan to reduce the size of the government--and what better way to do that than to show how irresponsible the government is in its budgeting. So Mr. Bush II's budgetary fecklessness was not what it seemed, a sort of "What me worry?" approach to government. Instead, it was a calculated attempt to make funding the government all but impossible. And that's exactly what the current crop of republican jugheads argue when they say that the government spends and spends and spends irresponsibly. They're describing the Bush approach to governing as if that approach defined the way that government functions.

So you hear all over the place that the current economic situation is proof positive that the mid-20th century idea of the "great society" is dead--usually put in terms of the death of socialism, but I don't see the great society as a socialist enterprise, so I don't use that term. But in fact what led to our economic situation is not the failure of the great society, but rather the failure of the neo-capitalism of Wall Street. We are where we are because the banks screwed up, and they screwed up because we got rid of the distinction between banking and investing, and we got rid of that distinction because the capitalist class wanted a free rein to make profits hand over fist. It's neo-capitalism because good old fashioned capitalism means investing money in the means of production, capital goods, whereas what Wall Street did (and continues to do) is invest money in paper shuffling. Maybe it'd be better to call it pseudo-capitalism.

Anyway, I absolutely do not buy into the proposition that to fix the economy we have to cut out the safety net. We do have to tame Wall Street. We do have to bring some rationality to Pentagon budgeting. We do have to prime the economic pump by investing in nation building at home, as they say. And we have to stop thinking that fixing the deficit means balancing the budget immediately. It ain't going to happen, and if we attempt to do it, the result is going to be the Great Depression of the Twenty-first Century.

By the way, the foreign aid budget is a whopping 56 billion per year--around 1% of the federal budget. And that sum includes all expenditures for the Department of State, so it's what funds all of our embassies and consulates and all of the diplomatic efforts that the nation undertakes, including for instance the deployment of forces in embassies and consulates, something to keep in mind in light of what happened in Benghazi.

Agreed (to you and Jim). There's no single panacea. It's going to take many measures, every one of which will be a bitter pill — in different ways and at different degrees — for just about everyone to swallow. At the moment, though, the right wants to label anything they historically object to as causes of the deficit, even if some of those things, like Social Security, actually do not contribute to the deficit.

Just about everything we spend money on has to be cut. But with a scalpel in skilled hands, not a dull hatchet wielded by a one-eyed ideologue.

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